Slack: The King of Collaboration Tools

https://ion8.net/slack-the-king-of-collaboration-tools/

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, chances are good that you’ve at least heard of Slack – the world’s most popular internal communication and collaboration tool. Slack is used by thousands of businesses around the world, having been acclaimed for its unique way of breaking your employees away from the confines of their inbox to streamline communication like never before. 

When used correctly, Slack can easily turn into one of the most versatile tools in your arsenal, revolutionizing the way your employees collaborate and communicate, even when your teams are working from home.

How Slack changes the way your team works together

Slack seamlessly brings together every member of your team in one easy-to-navigate real-time communication platform, sorted by channels. These channels can be used for many different purposes, whether it’s for different departments, teams, or projects. 

Everything related to that specific team or project is self-contained within that dedicated channel, available to anybody added into it, where users can chat freely, launch voice and video calls, upload files, create polls and more. All this with minimal training, since Slack features an interface that’s extremely easy to navigate and use within just minutes of opening it for the first time.

Unlike other chat apps, Slack keeps a full searchable history of every conversation within dedicated channels, ensuring that everything can be found quickly and easily – this is especially important for teams that are continually changing or rotating. Having dedicated channels for internal teams and departments makes collaboration seamless, keeping teams on topic, minimizing distractions, and making for an excellent place to brainstorm and generate new ideas.

Not only can Slack be used internally, but channels can also be easily shared with partners, vendors and clients, helping you communicate with third-parties in a way that has never been possible before. Slack eliminates the need for back and forth emailing and phone tag, putting everything you need directly into one channel where collaborators can instantly read and reply to messages, launch and answer calls, and upload or download important files. This means partners can be kept up-to-date on everything related to a project, relationships strengthened and built on trust, and communication can be streamlined to make hitting those tight deadlines easier.

Integrations with G Suite and Zoho make Slack even more versatile

The versatility of Slack’s internal communication and collaboration platform is furthered by the truly impressive integrations made possible by G Suite and Zoho, bringing your entire tech stack together in a meaningful way. In fact, Slack’s secret sauce is in how it integrates with nearly everything, but we recommend its use with G Suite and Zoho for the best business outcomes. 

With Slack and G Suite working in tandem, collaboration becomes seamless. When Slack and G Suite are integrated, users can instantly access Google Drive files within Slack, giving your team members the files they need while cutting out the need to switch between tabs constantly. You can respond to meeting invites by syncing Slack and Google Calendar, join calls from reminders, forward Gmail conversations into Slack, and reply directly to comments in Drive files. Users can also view shared Docs, Sheets, and Slides at a glance to see what their colleagues and clients have shared with them, and receive notifications when new files have been shared with them, or access to files has been requested.

Bringing Zoho CRM and Slack together enhances the sales process by letting your team members share lead details and reports with each other, pull up sales records and Zoho CRM dashboards for reference, and send reminders and sales updates directly to Slack from your CRM. This keeps your salespeople in the loop, guarantees that your salespeople won’t miss important events or calls, and ensures that your sales team works closely with one another to sell more efficiently than ever before.

ion8 is an experienced Zoho Advanced Partner and Google Partner with the skills needed to successfully implement and integrate workplace solutions like Zoho CRM, G Suite, and Slack, enhancing the way your business communicates and collaborates internally and externally. For more information about everything that ion8 can do for your business, visit our website today.